Good morning, Alloy Team... I hope all is well. I have been working on my characters and I was wondering if there is a way to modify the skin shader so I can actually have more scatter depth, like this? I am trying to create a character with very translucent skin, and most games I have been looking at has skin like this... would be nice to have in an update.

@Karearea
For the time being, no. It's looking like we'll be dogfooding it first, and seeing how it performs in some of our internal projects before we release it to the public.

@KRGraphics
We've been over this before, Alloy is limited by Unity's pipeline. Everything that you can manipulate is already available.

@eco_bach
Theoretically it should work as long as your phone supports linear rendering in Unity. We've never had an opportunity to test it though.

@aymn
Alloy uses metal-roughness material inputs like those in the Substance tools, as well as a packed map system for reducing storage and increasing efficiency at runtime. So you will need to invert your gloss map into a roughness map and use our packing scheme ((R) Metal Mask, (G) AO, (B) Specularity, (A) Roughness). You can either do this manually, or via our built-in packer tool under the menu "Window/Alloy/Material Map Channel Packer".

@Ruchir
We're in the process of upgrading Alloy to support Unity 5.6. Please be patient.

@abrasive
Yes, but with caveats. UBER is partially supported in deferred mode via a custom deferred override shader, but won't receive Alloy area lights on forward-mode shaders. RTP has the same problem, and also requires a patch to kill highlights for black specular splats.

Please please please heed this warning. There is a major bug in the current beta version of Unity 5.6 that 100% breaks Alloy's lights. It has been fixed on Unity's trunk, but we will not know if it makes it into 5.6.0, or the first patch build, until that version actually drops. That means, DO NOT upgrade your projects to 5.6 with alloy in them until you get the all-clear message from us. We will post here once a functional update _and_ a version of unity that is not broken for it is released and everything is safe and functional.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but this one was 100% out of our control. Someone at unity mucked up a core light method dropping a term in the color transfer to shader, and there's no way we can/could work around it on our end.

@AlteredPlanet
Mostly just Unity 5.6 integration. The biggest change is that our area lights now natively use Unity's Light color and intensity channels. This means that animation clips and light scripts will now work with Alloy without modification.

@AlteredPlanet
Mostly just Unity 5.6 integration. The biggest change is that our area lights now natively use Unity's Light color and intensity channels. This means that animation clips and light scripts will now work with Alloy without modification.

The full list will be part of our update. Please stand by.

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everytime I upgrade to a new version of unity textures have to be reimported , any idea why?

@AlteredPlanet
That's an unfortunate limitation of how we manipulate texture mip levels to get around Unity's attempts to overwrite them. We can't do much about it until Unity has a proper API for that task.

Scripts:
- Changed Area Light component menu path to "Alloy/Alloy Area Light".
- Changed Area Lights to work with Unity's light inspectors, including the new "Light Explorer".
* Now uses Unity Light component's color and intensity directly.
* You'll need to manually update your scripts and animation clips to point to the Unity light fields.
- Removed "Animated By Clip" option from AreaLight components.
* Now works with animation clips and third party script tools out of the box.
* You'll need to manually delete references to it from your animation clips.
- Renamed "Alloy Deferred Renderer Plus" component to "Alloy Effects Manager" to clarify its usage.
* Now listed under "Alloy/Alloy Effects Manager" in the component menu.
* Please write down your old settings before doing the update as you may need to re-enter them.
* You may only need to toggle the component to restore its command buffers.

if I delete alloy out of my project , upgrade then add it back in after upgrade will that fix the reimport issue?

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Well i'm not dev, but i would say kinda; no need for reimport, but for sure you need to import all after you delete alloy from your project and add alloy again. What is your problem anyway, just curious.

Well i'm not dev, but i would say kinda; no need for reimport, but for sure you need to import all after you delete alloy from your project and add alloy again. What is your problem anyway, just curious.

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everytime I upgrade to a new version of unity textures have to be reimported

@Crossway
I repeat, I can't solve that light issue in prior versions of Unity because the fix depends on changes made in 5.6.

@AlteredPlanet
I already told you, the import issue is because of a Unity limitation. For the time being, you just need to do the reimport after each upgrade. It's really not that complicated, just do a search for "_Alloy" files, select all, right click, Reimport.

Hey guys... I just downloaded the latest Alloy build and none of the packed maps in my assets update even if I am hitting the regenerate button. I also made sure to migrate my materials beforehand and deleted the old folders before updating.

@netincome2
We're looking into it now. According to another member of my team there have been reports of directional light issues with custom shaders in Unity 5.6. We'll be looking into where the problem is occurring while we get Alloy 3.6.1 ready.

Thanks for the hint... I couldn't reimport the alloy package using the Asset Store import button as it says there's nothing new to import. However, I deleted only the _PackerDefinition asset, then imported Alloy into an empty project, then copied over the _PackerDefinition file to the existing project and the problem was solved. Just needed to reimport all the _Alloy packed map files again.

Edit: Sorry, just realized n00body mentioned reimporting that particular file over a year ago. Forgot.

Anyway, hope this helps someone else with the same problem. Also wanted to thank you guys for always keeping Alloy up to date with the latest Unity features and releases. It's very much appreciated.

@OP3NGL: I have to wait til Josh wakes up to get a proper fix together. Until then, try replacing the contents of your Alloy->Scripts->MaterialMapChannelPacker->Config with the files in this zip, and tell me if it fixes things.

we updated project to 5.6 (with 491 alloyPM textures), and alloy to 3.6
after initial update we need to regenerate alloyPM textures (with custom editor cause you cannot select all of them and regenerate)

all goes well, but after generating lightmaps (mixed lights) console give us this :
and all scene is dark now

UPDATE
After restarting unity - all is pink and console says:

UPDATE 2
After deleting lightning data and turning off mixed lightning + restarting Unity - all is ok, so it seems that mixed lightning or something else is causing the problems

Oops...

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